Abita Springs Baptists giving new life to church building from 2,200 miles away

Ellis Lucia/The Times-PicayuneAfter praying to find a way to finance a church building, the Rev. Gerel Keene of the Louisiana Church of Abita Springs had a dream about an old white church, and he began looking for it.

When a Baptist minister in Abita Springs decided his congregation needed a new church, he wanted something old, something homey, something with character.

After some determined shopping, the Rev. Gerel Keene found what he was looking for - in Canada.

Upon arrival, the vintage beams, clapboard walls and stained glass windows will be reassembled. Some time next year, the Louisiana Church of Abita Springs will have a new home - one that will instantly become one of the oldest church buildings in St. Tammany Parish.

Ryan Scranton photoAll Saints Anglican Church in Granville Centre, Nova Scotia, was offered for sale on the condition that it be moved.

The 80-member congregation of the Louisiana Church currently holds Sunday services at the children’s day care center it operates. The church building will be erected in a vacant lot adjacent to the nursery.

“We want to put a church on Main Street in Abita Springs,” Keene said. “Our plan has always been to build a church from the ground up.”

Plans were drawn up for a new, modern church, but Keene said the price tag seemed excessive for what his congregation could handle at this time. After praying about that dilemma for awhile, he had a dream about an old white church, and he began looking for it.

“I didn’t know where it was,” Keene said. “North Louisiana? The Mississippi Delta? I just knew it was an old church.”

He called around to contacts from Texas to the Mississippi gulf coast, trying to find that church, or one like it, which he hoped to have loaded in one piece onto a barge somewhere and floated to St. Tammany Parish.

An online search led him north of the border, though, to Dan and Kimberly Reagan of TimberhArt Woodworks in Port Williams, Nova Scotia. The Reagans, specialists in timber framing and post and beam construction, had been commissioned to find a buyer for the 195-year-old decommissioned church at Granville Centre, with the stipulation that the church had to be removed from its existing location.

Ryan Scranton photoDeconstruction of All Saints Angican Church began weeks ago and is nearly complete now, almost down to the building’s 1814 cornerstone.

The area’s population has fallen in recent years, and the Anglican congregation in the region consolidated to a church in the city of Annapolis Royal. That left several rural church properties, including the All Saints Church, as no longer needed, and they were listed for sale.

The building looked promising to the Abita Springs clergyman. And, to Keene’s surprise, the Reagans explained to him that they would disassemble the church and deliver the parts by truck to Louisiana, where it would be put back together again.

He broached the idea with his church members. They seemed receptive, but curious how to get a nice old church from way up there to way down here.

“I knew we could work it out somehow,” he said. “I told them, ‘If God can part the Red Sea, he can move a little stick building down to Louisiana.”

Keene traveled up to Nova Scotia to check it out and found the church building to be much more impressive in person than in the photos he had seen on his computer: the nine-foot-tall front door, the stained-glass windows, the massive beams, all the beautiful wood took his breath away. He happily envisioned them all on Main Street in Abita Springs, and a deal was struck.

The demolition began weeks ago and is nearly complete now, almost down to the building’s 1814 cornerstone. Keene hopes to have it reconstructed, with a renovated balcony, new heating and wiring and other upgrades, by the end of next summer.

The cost to tear down a church, haul it across the continent and rebuild it, erector-set style? Keene is figuring the final bill will be between $300,000 and $320,000.

And the new setting might even include a historical marker of some sort to explain the building’s unique history. Keene, a native of the Natchitoches area, is mindful of Louisiana’s historical connection with Nova Scotia, the ancestral home of Acadian settlers who were the forebears of Louisiana’s Cajun people.

The Catholic, French-speaking Acadians were exiled from Nova Scotia by the British more than 250 years ago. Although a few of them were eventually allowed to return, they were not permitted to resettle in the lush Annapolis Valley where they had once lived, so it is unlikely that anyone of Acadian ancestry would have attended the Anglican church once it was built in British-to-the-core Granville Centre.

It will be a different story as the church approaches its 200th anniversary in its new Louisiana home, though: Keene’s wife, Amy, is a Cajun.